" . . . remain pure and unsullied for all time"

Nick Packwood waxes wroth about the idiocies on display during a recent BBC documentary on the reconstruction of Dubrovnik:

It seems to me there is more going on here than a mere academic propensity to find something to moan about no matter the cost***; even worse than rolling into town and imposing on local hospitality only to make a cretinous dismissal of years of effort in restoration. No, it is that Billings seems to think there is an authentic Dubrovnik to be replaced, a Dubrovnik simultaneously untouched by war and yet somehow ringed by fortress walls subject to hundreds of years of wind and rain. He is English and should know better. Oxford colleges plants small forests to replace roof timbers centuries in advance; two-hundred years sounds like a perfectly reasonable time-frame for some tiles to settle in. Or are we meant to believe some gruesome Disney-esque mock-aging should have been carried out instead?

The logic underlying Billings frankly creepy yearning for an unchanging world strikes me to be the same as that underlying the emotive anti-logic behind claims to anthropogenic global warming.**** Many people seem to believe there is something called Nature which, but for human intervention, would remain pure and unsullied for all time. Yet it should be obvious to any mind that has moved beyond Bronze Age metaphor that we live in a world whose only constant is constant change*****. It is sad that things pass away - glaciers, forests, whole species - but without them nothing new would come into being. This is as true for the ephemeral works of humanity as it is for continents or stars or galactic superclusters. It must have been a nightmare to live in Dubrovnik under siege and an almost hallucinatory strangeness its medieval walls should once again shelter its people in a time of modern mortars, artillery and 24-hour cable news. It is rubbing salt into the wound to be lectured on the subject by a proponent of a vampiric ideology of stasis.